“A brand-new time, a brand-new place, and I’m brand-new too. Every beginning is a birth, and every ending, no matter what is ended, brings with it the taint of death. All things should be accepted calmly and with a light heart, because fate in its many disguises always stems from the same eternal decree, just as it must forever be the essence of a triangle that the sum of its three angles always equals one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. If you were to think about this fact for a minute, Yonatan, you would be surprised to realize that not only is it true, it can also give us the most wonderful peace of mind. To accept all things, to understand all things, and to respond to all things with perfect inner tranquillity! Mind you, I don’t deny that a part of what I say comes from the philosopher Spinoza, who, by the way, was a diamond polisher by profession. Well, I’ve told you in a nutshell what I believe in. And you, Yonatan, what do you believe in?”

“I,” said Yonatan distractedly, unintentionally kicking over an empty can of engine oil, “am freezing my ass off and getting sick. If you ask me, we should pour a little gasoline beneath that barrel of diesel oil over there, put a match to it, make a great big bonfire, and burn down this whole fucking tractor shed with all its fucking tractors once and for all. Just to get warm. Look, this is the patient. With a little good will you can get it to turn over, but after two or three minutes it conks out. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know why. All I know is that a note slipped under my door last night told me to take the new mechanic living next to Bolognesi to the tractor shed in the morning. If you really are one, why don’t you see what’s wrong with this damn thing while I sit down and rest my legs.”

Azariah Gitlin complied with enthusiasm. Having rolled up his pants cuffs with his fingertips in a way that reminded Yonatan of a fashion model fingering the hem of her dress in a news-reel, the young man climbed gingerly onto one of the tractor treads to study the engine. From this vantage point, without turning around to face Yonatan, he posed two or three simple questions that the latter was able to answer. When he asked yet another, Yonatan replied from his seat on an overturned crate, “If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t need you here in the first place.”

Azariah Gitlin did not take offense. He nodded several times, as if understanding Yonatan’s dilemma only too well, made some vague remark about the importance of creative intuition even in purely technical matters, and patiently blew a puff of warm breath across his musicianly fingers.